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The book provides a masterful overview of work on capabilities, giving us a structure to help us see how this varied work can be rightly seen as pursuing a single substantial approach and suggesting how it can be taken further. Robeyns has laid this all out with patient clarity and with an effective concern to make the exposition fully accessible to readers in all different fields. In doing so, she has done a great service, not only for the capability approach, but for all of the fields on which it touches, including philosophy and economics.

Robeyns sets out to clear the ground and to place the approach in perspective in a way useful to both practitioners and fresh entrants. Although the subtitle of the book, The Capability Approach Re-Examined, tends to give the impression of it being a fresh scholarly venture into the field, it seems fair to call it a comprehensive and systematic survey that separates the wheat from the chaff. As a survey, the work is original, dispassionate and theoretically well informed, with the author bringing her own substantial contributions in the field to bear upon it. The book is perhaps best viewed as an authoritative manual of the state-of-the-art in the capability approach.

In this new book, Ingrid Robeyns does scholars a considerable service by offering a rigorous, precise, and in many ways novel account of the capabilities approach. Among the new contributions, Robeyns develops a modular view of capabilities that distinguishes between what is a necessary component of a capabilities theory and what is optional. She also defends capabilities against some common critiques in the literature, often offering novel defense but accepting other trenchant criticisms...If I were to recommend one book to introduce a reader to the topic, this would be it.

This book is a magnificent achievement: it reaches across philosophy and the social sciences, across research, policy and practice in the global North and South, and across many decades of debate and discussion within and outside the capability approach. It does so in a way which is readable and clear, and it manages to avoid on the one hand being too polemical, and on the other hand being too superficial. Ingrid Robeyns is uniquely well-placed to write such a book, being herself a well-established inter-disciplinary scholar whose work has contributed enormously to the development of the capability approach over the years. It has been a frustration for many of us that no comprehensive textbook on the capability approach yet exists, and this will fill that gap admirably.

—Dr. Tania Burchardt, Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) and Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics

[T]his is an impressive book, as well as a hugely useful resource, and should do much to improve future scholarship in this field.

How do we evaluate ambiguous concepts such as wellbeing, freedom, and social justice? How do we develop policies that offer everyone the best chance to achieve what they want from life? The capability approach, a theoretical framework pioneered by the philosopher and economist Amartya Sen in the 1980s, has become an increasingly influential way to think about these issues.

Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-Examined is both an introduction to the capability approach and a thorough evaluation of the challenges and disputes that have engrossed the scholars who have developed it. Ingrid Robeyns offers her own illuminating and rigorously interdisciplinary interpretation, arguing that by appreciating the distinction between the general capability approach and more specific capability theories or applications we can create a powerful and flexible tool for use in a variety of academic disciplines and fields of policymaking.

This book provides an original and comprehensive account that will appeal to scholars of the capability approach, new readers looking for an interdisciplinary introduction, and those interested in theories of justice, human rights, basic needs, and the human development approach.

1. Introduction
1.1 Why the capability approach?
1.2 The worries of the sceptics
1.3 A yardstick for the evaluation of prosperity and progress
1.4 Scope and development of the capability approach
1.5 A guide for the reader

3. Clarifications
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Refining the notions of ‘capability’ and ‘functioning’
3.2.1 Capability as an opportunity versus capability as an opportunity set
3.2.2 Nussbaum’s terminology
3.2.3 What are ‘basic capabilities’?
3.2.4 Conceptual and terminological refinements
3.3 Are capabilities freedoms, and if so, which ones?
3.3.1 Capabilities as positive freedoms?
3.3.2 Capabilities as opportunity or option freedoms?
3.3.3 Are capabilities best understood as freedoms?
3.4 Functionings or capabilities?
3.5 Human diversity in the capability approach
3.6 Collective capabilities
3.7 Which notion of wellbeing is used in the capability approach?
3.7.1 The aim and context of accounts of wellbeing
3.7.2 The standard taxonomy of philosophical wellbeing accounts
3.7.3 The accounts of wellbeing in the capability approach
3.8 Happiness and the capability approach
3.8.1 What is the happiness approach?
3.8.2 The ontological objection
3.8.3 Mental adaptation and social comparisons
3.8.4 Comparing groups
3.8.5 Macro analysis
3.8.6 The place of happiness in the capability approach
3.9 The capability approach and adaptive preferences
3.10 Can the capability approach be an explanatory theory?
3.11 A suitable theory for all normative questions?
3.12 The role of resources in the capability approach
3.13 The capability approach and theories of justice
3.13.1 A brief description of the literature on theories of justice
3.13.2 What do we need for a capability theory of justice?
3.13.3 From theories of justice to just practices and policies
3.14 Capabilities and human rights
3.14.1 What are human rights?
3.14.2 The interdisciplinary scholarship on human rights
3.14.3 Why a capability-based account of human rights?
3.14.4 Are capabilities sufficient to construct a theory of human rights?
3.14.5 The disadvantages
3.15 Conclusion

4. Critiques and Debates
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Is everything that’s called a capability genuinely a capability?
4.3 Should we commit to a specific list of capabilities?
4.4 Why not use the notion of needs?
4.5 Does the capability approach only address the government?
4.6 Is the capability approach too individualistic?
4.6.1 Different forms of individualism
4.6.2 Does the capability approach pay sufficient attention to groups?
4.6.3 Social structures, norms and institutions in the capability approach
4.7 What about power and political economy?
4.7.1 Which account of power and choice?
4.7.2 Should we prioritise analysing the political economy?
4.8 Is the capability approach a liberal theory?
4.9 Why ‘human development’ is not the same idea
4.10 Can the capability approach change welfare economics?
4.10.1 Welfare economics and the economics discipline
4.10.2 Non-welfarism
4.10.3 Empirical possibilities and challenges
4.10.4 Towards a heterodox capabilitarian welfare economics?
4.11 Taking stock

5. Which Future for the Capability Approach?

References
Index

Ingrid Robeyns holds the chair in Ethics of Institutions at the Ethics Institute of Utrecht University. She also serves as the president-elect of the Human Development and Capability Association. She studied Economics and Philosophy and obtained her doctorate at the University of Cambridge. She has held residences at Columbia University, the London School of Economics and Oxford University. In 2016, she was awarded the prestigious Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council, to conduct research on the question whether there should be any upper limits to the amount of financial and ecological resources a person could have.

Robeyns’ research explores themes such as social justice and sustainability from the perspective of philosophy, economics and social sciences. She has conducted extensive research on applied ethical questions, such as the ethical analysis of welfare state institutions and alternative economic systems. Her research career has seen her develop into one of the world's leading theoreticians of the capability approach.

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